Whiteout!

Chapter 3

Barney Smales said, 'Stand still.'

'I wasn't thinking of moving.'

There were slopping noises as he moved round in the darkness and first one shower was turned off, then the other. 'Better hold on to my hand. You'll trip over something and break your limey neck.' He led me quietly across the wooden floor of the big hut and round a partition to where towels and clothes hung.

'It must be nice,' I said, 'to be able to see in the dark. What's caused all this?'

'Generator.'

'Is it serious ?' I found the towel and began to rub myself dry. Smales said, 'It's one out of three. Plenty of back-up. But if the stand-by generator fails to come in, why, then we could be in a little trouble. Just moveyour limey ass, huh?'

I stopped towelling, and began feeling for my clothes, and asked, 'How' long before it matters?'

'Four minutes. Five maybe. No more. After that the water pipes start freezing. They freeze, they bust wide open and then, brother, we got to rebuild the whole damn structure.'

The lights came on again. Smales was fully dressed and fastening his boots. I was still trying to button my shirt. He said, 'Okay now. Take your time. Reckon you can find your way to the club?'

I nodded.

'I want this little explanation about generator breakdown.'

Fully-dressed, snow-booted and parka-ed, I closed the door of the shower hut, stepped out into the chill of the tunnel, and glanced at the pipes that hung up there on the snow wall. The hazard was obvious. The pipes were bound with insulating material, but they hung an inch away from snow so compacted that it was almost ice. There were heaters built in at intervals along the pipes. With the system working, you turned on a tap and hot water came out; after four minutes without power, the men at Hundred would find themselves melting snow in old buckets for drinking water. I shivered briefly in the icy air, stopped looking at the pipes, and hurried off to the club trench. To reach it, I had to go into the big, central tunnel, the one they called Main Street, and there I looked again at the long lines of pipes and electrical conduits suspended from the walls. Camp Hundred ate up a lot of power.

With Smales away at the generators and Kelleher already busy at the reactor, there was nobody I knew in the club. I stood for a moment in the doorway, looking at the little scene of Polar domesticity. Over in a corner, four men sat at a card table, three concentrating hard, one leaning back, hands in pockets, watching his partner. The place was quiet and even the four or five men at the bar were turned towards the card players. Then one of them turned, saw me and came over. 'You're Mr Bowes, from England?'

'Yes.'

'Glad to have you here. I'm George Herschel, engineering.' He was a major, fiftyish, red hair greying, broad and cheerful.

We shook hands and I nodded towards the card players. 'Something important?'

Herschel grinned. 'See the guy in the corner? Well, he's got a kind of weakness for little slams. People listen to the bidding with half an ear and then when he has a slam going, we kinda make a bet or two.'

I smiled. 'Will he make it?'

'He better. They been redoubled. Drink?'

'Thank you.'

'Take your pick.' I looked along the lines of whisky bottles, then began counting. There were more than thirty brands: Scotch, Bourbon, Irish, Canadian.

'Tomatin,' I said, 'since it's there.'

He poured for me. 'Barney. He likes a bar to offer a choice. Ice?'

I shook my head. 'Just water.'

He passed the water jug and said, 'Now, let's see. Just what was happening in England around the middle of the seventeenth century ? Don't wonder why. Just answer.'

I thought for a moment. 'Mayflower? The Pilgrim Fathers?'

He nodded. 'The water you're drinking fell as snow right around that time. Water well's down to over four hundred feet. We melt the snow for water.'

I poured water and raised my glass. 'To the Pilgrim Fathers?'

'Right.' We drank. 'Now come meet some of the guys.'

The little slam went down to mixed jeers and applause, money changed hands and after that I was made to feel very welcome, and also was sharply cross-questioned. I had, after all, been in the real world only a short time ago and they wanted reassurance that it was still there.

'I do seem to recall,' the slam-loser said, 'that they used to have something called girls out there. That right?'

'They used to be there,' I said. 'They've become extinct while you've been away.'

The conversation wasn't exactly elevated, but it was fairly typical. The society was recognizable, and its patterns, or most of them, were familiar. Here was the atmosphere of all the places where men are thrown together, unassorted, in a group, and have to learn to live with it. There was the endless flow of bad jokes and badinage, the careful but occasional and elaborate courtesy, the wall pin-ups and the bar. Claustrophobia in comfort, but claustrophobia.

The doctor saw me looking round and said, 'Not a sane man in the place. Nor a window.' His name was Kirton and he was a tall, dark, heavy-set New Yorker.

'Not even you?'

'Me least of all.'

'What are you suffering from ?'

'Me? Loneliness.'

'No patients?'

'You kidding? I'm a gynaecologist, in theory anyway. Play chess?'

'Sorry.'

He said mournfully, 'I'm in the wrong army. There was one chess player up here. Just one, then he went back. All they send up here is bridge players. Now if I was in the Red Army...'

Herschel said, 'Be grateful, Doc. You'll be back home in three months. They do three years.'

'But there's chess. The years go quickly. What's tonight's movie?'

Herschel said, 'I dunno. Grapes of Wrath, maybe Gone with the Wind: Kirton winced. 'I keep begging them. If you're in the old movie business, I tell them, let's have Birth of a Nation or something. Keep me in touch with my specialty. You like music?'

'Yes.'

'Drop by tomorrow. I got an operating room, the acoustics are great. Good coffee too and beautiful blondes.'

'The blondes are on the walls,' Herschel said.

The door opened and closed. I glanced round. Barney Smales was hanging up his parka by the door and silence fell. For a moment I thought it was in deference to his rank, but when Kirton said, 'So who threw the switch, Barney?' all he got was little looks of irritation. The silence sprang from tension; they were waiting for Smales's news, anxious about it.

He said, 'Fuel, they reckon. Fitters are stripping it right down.'

Somebody behind me asked, 'How long?'

Smales shrugged. 'All night maybe. Feed pipes may be clogged. Who knows? Hey, Doc, give those fitters something so they stay awake, huh?'

'Sure,' Kirton said. He turned to me and winked. 'An opportunity, they said in the army literature, to practise real medicine in on-the-spot conditions. They really said that. Benzedrine for diesel fitters !'

Smales said, 'Meanwhile, in honour of our British guest, we're having a change of movie tonight.' He looked at me with bright-eyed amusement. 'We're gonna run Scott of the Antarctic. And for those of you who are always complaining about too many dames, I'll tell you. After half-way through reel one, it's all men with beards. Great, great, great entertainment!' He came over and clapped me on the shoulder.

'Just want to make you popular.'

At dinner, I found myself seated next to a young lieutenant named Foster, clean-cut, well-pressed and shiny. Also morose, or perhaps my choice of word is poor; but certainly I thought him morose at the time. Later I learned he was depressed with goodreason : the man who'd been lost on the surface a couple of weeks earlier had been a young cousin of his. At any rate, he didn't much want to talk and I was beginning by now to feel tired. Seven thousand feet up on the icecap, weariness settles easily. Later, like the rest of them, I endured the Antarctic manfully, contrasting the appalling suffering of Scott's party with the thirty brands of whisky in the club. Everybody else, everybody, that is, who stayed awake, must have done the same. When the lights came up, Barney Smales was on his feet quickly, looking at faces, smiling a little to himself. Even his choice of films had psychological purpose. Then I went to bed. I switched off the light and lay in the darkness, eyes open, thinking about this weird place and the people I'd been put among. They were proud of Camp Hundred, yet it sat on them like lead weights. They tried so hard to create a tolerable environment where nature was deeply unwilling to tolerate life. They had beaten back nature, but not very far, and it lay outside, up above, all around, snarling and whistling and waiting. Above me was the ceiling, above that the tunnel roof, and above that forty-knot winds and forty-minus temperatures and a million or so square miles of snow. I snuggled lower in the warm bed and thought soberly that the TK4's trials would be trials indeed, and not just for the machine.

Next morning the room was stuffy and sweaty. Too warm, too airless and four blank walls with only the outline of the door frame for relief. I dressed, walked to the shower hut, undressed, showered and shaved, dressed, went to the mess hall, took off two layers of clothing and saw Kelleher champing stolidly at a plateful of steak and eggs. Picking up a moulded plastic tray, 1 moved along the cafeteria line, making my selections. Corn flakes, milk that was cold and delicious and apparently fresh but which I later learned was reconstituted, ham and eggs and tomatoes, fresh bread rolls that were still warm from the oven, fruit juice, coffee. Then I joined Kelleher and said the logistics were impressive. He nodded, unimpressed, and said he thought the tomatoes were showing their age. I said it was miraculous they were thereat all, since they'd had to travel umpteen thousand miles in conditions ill-tuned to the well-being of tomatoes.

Kelleher said, 'Well, I'll tell you, bud. This is not a day you'll find me whistling in admiration of the miracles of technology.'

'Trouble with the reactor?'

'That's what that thing is ? You could have fooled me. It looks like a goddam junk yard.'

I waited. He flicked a sour glance at me. 'You'd think, maybe, that a guy wouldn't carry money in a top pocket when he's working in clean environments. So what happens is this. We renew the uranium rods, we get the water in all nice and clean. No spillages, no bumps, no problems. We're all ready to start warming, right? Go critical in a few hours, right? So I take a last look around first before we throw the switches, and what do I see?'

I said I couldn't imagine.

'Two quarters and a goddam nickel, that's what I see. Right there in the kettle. What do those guys think they're gonna do in there, dive for pennies?'

'So what happens now ?'

He forked egg into his mouth and washed it down with coffee. 'Sleep, that's what. Then we take the goddam thing apart again, then we work all night again, and then tomorrow maybe, if some idiot don't drop his knife and fork in there, we start thinking about going critical again.'

I said, 'Tough luck.'

Kelleher put down his fork. 'No,' he said. 'I can take tough luck. Buddy, I know all about the psychology problems they got. Sure they get tired. Concentration gets thin. Sure. But this is carelessness and, what's worse, it's dangerous carelessness. You get outside metallic contamination when that baby's critical and you really got problems.'

Kirton joined us then, nursing a cup of coffee. Kelleher said, 'What you'll do, Doc, is you'll get pale and thin and die. Where's your two thousand calories ?'

Kirton said, 'I'm not like you. I lie around all day getting fat. Sometimes I think I might as well take the ice-cream and the bread and apply them direct to my waistline here. That's where they finish up anyway and it would sure take a load off my digestive system. How's the steam engine?'

Kelleher made a rude noise.

'Oh yeah! And number one diesel?'

'Who knows!' Kelleher looked round the mess hall, then pointed with his fork. 'Either they just finished, or they're still working on it. See over there? Those guys with the oil there are diesel fitters.'

I looked across. Three men sat at a table in near silence, eating, and looking unhappy. I said, 'I don't think they've finished.'

'Half systems go,' Kirton said.

'Half?' I was conscious all the time of being the new boy, the one full of naive questions, the one who sat quietly and listened.

Kelleher said, 'One reactor, three diesel generators. Belt, suspenders and two hands to hold the pants up, right ? So now the belt's broken and the suspenders have gone. Two diesel generators left and we're holding our own pants up.'

I blinked at him. It was so easy to duck reality, sitting there in the cheerful mess hall eating good hot food, but too often reality tapped you on the shoulder and looked deep in your eyes. Kirton said, 'So eat the steak and get to work.'

They'd both gone and I was smoking a contemplative cigarette when Smales came in, loaded up a tray and joined me. It was the German accent this time. 'So, Englander,' he said. 'You enffy us zis efficiency, nicht wahr?'

I grinned at him. 'I hope you're like us. Muddling through in the end.' The grin syndrome had got to me already, I thought. 'But it does seem like quite a little chapter of accidents.'

'It does,' he agreed affably. 'And we have 'em I admit it, now and then. Good eggs.'

'One minute you sound like Erich von Stroheim, the next like P. G. Wodehouse,' I said. 'Meantime, I'd like to know about the hovercraft.'

'M'sieu, m'sieu,' he soothed. 'Ze Swing she leave today. Two days, zree, she is here.'

'I prefer Bardot. What about the diesel?'

'Don't you go neurotic on me! You play ping-pong?'

'It's been known.'

'Okay, so we'll have some healthy activity. Right after breakfast. You reckon that floating fan of yours will work up there?'

'It's pretty good.'

'It'll need to be.'

I said, 'Before I start, it'd be nice to know where people stand. Don't you like the idea?'

'I just like things proved, well proved, before I start loading lives aboard.'

'It's pretty well proved.'

He looked at me, eyes suddenly hard. 'So are diesels.'

'Things are bad, then ?*

'Fuel's contaminated. Some kind of build-up in the combustion chambers and feed lines.'

I was about to ask what the contamination was, when a soldier appeared at the table, breathing hard, face red with exertion. He saluted. 'Major Smales, sir.'

"What is it?'

'Sir, it's the bulldozer, the one that sweeps the doorstep.'

'Well?'

'They found tracks, sir. In the overnight snow. Big tracks. Looks like there may be - ' he hesitated, then found the nerve to continue - 'there could be a polar bear in the camp, sir.' He watched Smales with nervous .eyes.

'A polar bear?' Barney repeated softly, looking at his plate.

'They're big tracks, sir.'

Barney swivelled sweet eyes up to look at him. 'You got some kind of a bet on this?'

The soldier swallowed. 'No, sir.'

'Because if money's riding on this,' Barney said, 'you'll be shovelling snow till your ass falls off.'

'Yes, sir. But it's true, Major. Those tracks, they come right in the tunnel entrance.'

Barney nodded dismissively, pushed his plate away and said, 'Polar bears, yet!' in a stage Yiddish accent. Then he walked over to a wall installation and lifted off a microphone. A moment later his voice was booming out of a loudspeaker. 'Okay, now listen. This is the Commander. I got a report there's a polar bear down here.'

Subdued laughter erupted at several tables and Smales looked round balefully. 'A real bear, this one, with a white fur coat. All right. Nobody leaves the hut he's in. Any man not in a hut gets inside fast and stays there pending new orders. If the bear's here, he's hungry. He's walked a hundred miles and you'll taste real good to him. I want a Polecat from the vehicle bay outside the mess hall on the double. Await further instructions.' He hung up the mike, returned to the table and shrugged on his parka. I asked, 'What exactly do you do now?'

'You want to come, come.'

We waited at the mess hall door until the Polecat's engine snarled up outside, then opened the door and took rapid steps across to safety behind metal doors. Smales said, 'Bear can't be here, he'd make for the mess hall.'

'Has this happened before?'

He shook his head. 'They saw tracks once, in Chance's time, the last commander. But nobody ever saw a bear. Meanwhile, we aren't exactly equipped for polar bears.' He told the driver to take us to the command hut. 'But if he's here, he's trouble. If he's standing between us and the door of my office, there's no way.'

I said, 'Damn it, this is the army. You could shoot him.'

Smales shook his head. 'We're not a fighting army. We're on Danish territory here; there are agreements, terms of use. We've only one stick that spits fire and it's on my office wall. If we can't get it, somebody's got to do battle with fire axes. But not me.'

The driver turned. 'Trench entrance will be too narrow for the cat, sir.'

'Turn her round,' Smales ordered, 'so the lights shine down the trench. Main beams. Blind the bastard if he's in there.'

'Okay, sir.' The driver busied himself with the track levers, manoeuvring the little vehicle into position across Main Street. 'Can't see anything, sir.'

'Right.' Smales put his hand on the door handle. 'If he's in here, at least we got him blocked.'

The driver said, 'Want me to go, sir?'

'So you can read what's on my desk?' Smales said. 'Not in a million years.'

He slipped suddenly out of the cab and sprinted across the fifteen yards that separated us from the command hut, stood for a long few moments fumbling with the key, then slid inside, slamming the door. The driver and I both let our breath go at the same moment.

Smales reappeared quickly and again sprinted for the Polecat. Safely back inside, he patted the rifle, an old-fashioned .303 wooden-stocked army weapon and said, 'This is what the Danish Government allows us. It was captured from Sitting Bull. I'm the only guy here old enough to remember how to use it. Now, let's look at that doorstep.'

At the tunnel entrance one of the big, fifty-six-inch-track bulldozers stood snorting and thumping. As we got out, a corporal climbed down from the cab and pointed. Six deep prints, already partly filled, showed in the fresh snow that had blown in during the night beneath the shelter of the roof. Beyond the overhang, where there was more snow, no tracks were to be seen. The tunnel floor, where the snow had long ago been churned into dirty ice crystals, carried no tracks.

'Think it's a bear, sir?' the corporal asked Smales.

'How the hell do I know. I'm not an Eskimo tracker! But whatever made those tracks had big feet. So we've sure got to act like Mr Bear's inside here.'

He turned and looked back along the deserted length of Main Street.

'Perhaps,' I said, 'the bear came in here, went all the way along, and out the other end.'

Smales turned to the corporal. 'You swept the step up there yet?'

'No, sir.'

'Okay. What we'll do, we'll start at the far end. If there are tracks going out, that's all jim-dandy. If not, we work our way right back here, checking trenches as we go.'

'What do you want me to do, sir?'

'Get back in the 'dozer,' Smales said, 'and stay right here. If we flush him out and he comes this way, you put a scare in him with the dozer, a real scare. But don't try to kill him, polar bears are getting kinda rare.'

We climbed back into the Polecat and roared rapidly along Main Street to inspect the other ramp. No tracks showed in the smooth white slope of new snow. Smales and I looked at one another. Tracks leading into Camp Hundred, no tracks leading out; if a polar bear had made the tracks, he was in among us.

The search began. There were seventeen trenches to examine, most of them constructed in the same fashion. They had been cut originally with Peters snow-ploughs, the Swiss machines which throw snow out of a kind of chimney and pile it to one side. Each time the plough had made a pass, it had cut deeper and piled the snow higher. When the trenches were thirty feet deep, they had simply been roofed over with curved corrugated steel and snow heaped on top. Where each trench connected with Main Street, a wall of snow bricks had been built to narrow the entrance. Some of the walls had doors in them, others were merely arched openings, depending on the use made of the trench. Storage tunnels, by and large, could be locked. The ones holding living quarters, laboratory huts and recreation facilities remained open. Most trenches had one additional refinement, an escape stair at the far end so that in case of fire or some other disaster, the men could climb out through a hatch on to the icecap outside. If you could call that escape.

Where trench doors were locked, Smales didn't bother opening them. Where the entrances stood open, he'd repeat the process he had followed at the Command tunnel and wait until the Polecat's lights were glaring inside before peering cautiously round the corner of the snow wall. Then he'd go in. A minute later, maybe two minutes later, he'd reappear, shake his head, and wave the Polecat on to the next trench. The minutes he spent in the trenches were long minutes, even to me, secure, warm and safe inside the Polecat. What they must have seemed like to him, I can't imagine, but as an exhibition of cold courage, what Barney Smales was doing was impressive. Oh, he had the gun, right enough, but polar bears are white, and so were the tunnel walls, and there were shadows and bright reflections and piles of things the bear could have been behind, and the animal would have the faster reflexes. He worked his way doggedly along the length of Main Street, finding nothing. Each time he came out of a trench he'd shake his head and I'd sigh with relief and the driver would move the Polecat along. One tunnel he didn't even approach. It housed the six bodies and was locked. Finally we were back where we started, by the bulldozer. There was only one tunnel left now, a few yards in from the bottom of the ramp, with the words 'Reserve Fuel Store' in stencilled paint on the wooden door. I saw Smales glance at it, then glance again and finally walk over and push the door. It swung open and he looked inside, then came out and waved his arm. I climbed out of the Polecat and joined him. 'What do you make of that?'

he said.

I looked, then went inside, stepping over the coaming. This was one of the shorter trenches, no more than thirty yards long and on two levels. The floor of the rear half of the tunnel had been cut a couple of feet deeper to accommodate two of those big neoprene-plastic fuel tanks that look a little like very big black rubber dinghies. But these two no longer looked like that, indeed were barely visible in the huge pool of diesel oil that had leaked out of them and now lay in a dark lake that rose half-way up the two-foot sides. Where the neoprene of the collapsed flexible tanks was visible above the oil, I could see slashes in the plastic. I pointed and Smales said, 'Yeah, I saw.'

'Would a bear do that?'

'A zoologist I'm not. But nobody else would, that's for sure.' He was silent for a moment, then said,

'There's forty thousand gallons right there.'

I'd been looking at the slashes and thinking about the claws that could have made them and the strength of the beast. Now I looked at Smales and said, 'This oil can't be used?'

He nodded. 'Damn right.'

'So you're short of oil?'

'Let's just say,' Smales said, 'that the way things stand right now, the oil we got is six whits more precious than rubies . . .